How One Medical School Is Dealing With Too Much Information

Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has unveiled a new set of online courses for those interested in medicine and other health professions. Photographer: Michael Fein/Bloomberg News.

Medical students have a problem with TMI (too much information). Way TMI. Same with nursing, dental and other health profession students. The TMI problem doesn't mean that students are sharing personal information about their bodily functions when they really shouldn't (although being immersed in healthcare can make you forget conversation boundaries). Rather, in this case, TMI is the massive and growing deluge of information that anyone studying healthcare has to squeeze into the cranium these days. Drinking from such a firehose can be even more difficult if the student lacks prior experience (in medicine and other health sciences, not prior experience drinking from a firehose). With medicine and healthcare changing more rapidly than before, education has to change accordingly...and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has just unveiled a program that aims to help with TMI.

This summer, HMS is debuting “HMX Fundamentals,” an online course and certificate program for those interested in going to medical school or other health professional schools. The courses are meant to be highly interactive with animations and videos, including those with real doctors and real patients. Taking one course would cost you $800; two, $1,000; and all four, $1,800. But before you have your five-year-old kid enroll, keep in mind that there's an application process (including essays) for the opportunity to take courses in physiology, immunology, biochemistry and genetics. Finish the course and you get a certificate of completion. Finish the course well and you may get a certificate of achievement. Currently, neither certificate counts toward credit for a future degree. But in the future? Who knows?

HMS Associate Dean for Online Learning Michael J. Parker, who has led efforts to build the HMX program, explained that the courses are helpful for those who are "changing careers to help them see whether a health profession is right for them" as well as those who may otherwise have "imposter syndrome, meaning that they got into medical school but don't have the scientific grounding yet." The courses also may help replace some of the materials normally covered in the first two years of medical school so that time can be used for other things such as learning additional aspects of patient care, health policy and population health, and eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom.

This new HMS program highlights the need to rethink and reimagine medical and healthcare education. Healthcare has gotten exponentially more complex since the 1960s and 1970s when the standard templates for medical (spend the first two years cramming scientific facts into your head and then the third and fourth years trying to make yourself useful in the hospital) and other health professional education were established. In addition to the overwhelming growth of scientific information, the past few decades have seen an increasing need for health professionals to understand other topics not traditionally taught in most medical schools, such as health policy, economics, law, sociology and operations. Simply adding to the mound of courses that medical students already have to take would be like pouring a bar's worth of drinks into a shot glass.

Many traditional medical school lectures need to give way to more innovative educational methods. (Photo: Shutterstock)

It's time to change the containers and hose. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, HMS helped lead the way in changing some of this with its New Pathways program that reduced passive lecture-based learning, replacing it with more case-based, group and self-teaching learning. The New Pathways program began de-emphasizing rote absorption of facts and instead emphasized how to best find the right information. While such teaching seemed a somewhat radical departure at the time, now more and more medical schools are trying to adopt variations of this approach. Also, medical schools have been becoming increasingly diverse, not only from a gender, racial and ethnic standpoint, but also from the standpoint of career and educational backgrounds. Greater diversity calls for more diverse teaching approaches.

Forcing students to drink increasing amounts of information without changing the hose or the containers doesn't help anyone and in the long run hurts students, doctors, medicine and patients. Eventually the information will start spilling out the rear end, which could get ugly...and providing a picture of this happening may indeed be TMI.

I’ve been in the worlds of business, medicine, and global and public health. And these worlds are a lot more similar and different than you think. Currently, I am an Associate Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Executiv...